Sam scrambled to his teenage double, not bothering to get to his feet, but instead crawling onto the road where the student lay on his side.
At a glance, Sam could tell his arm was broken — he didn’t have to be a doctor to see the unnatural angle. But broken arms could heal. It was the head trauma that was the real cause for concern.
This can’t be happening. I don’t remember this happening. Oh god, this is all wrong.
As Sam inspected the gaping wound on the kid’s temple, the young Sam let out a soft moan.
“Hey, are you with me?” Sam asked, wide-eyed. He cradled Young Sam’s cheek as he looked up at the crowd of people that had started to gather.
“Is anyone calling an ambulance?” he cried out. One of the students from the group he’d been distracted by hurried towards a phone booth.
He peered back down at the boy, whose eyes were now half-open, and looking back at him with a confused expression.
“Hey, buddy,” said Sam, his throat constricting with anxiety, “thanks for doing that, but you really… really shouldn’t have…”
The younger Sam tried to speak, but all that came out was a croak, and his eyes rolled back, falling shut once again.
This is really serious.
Sam did his best to keep the kid from further injury before the ambulance arrived, as the mid-fifties driver of the car sat at the side of the road, head in his palms.
Where’s Al? He should be here. He told me he’d be here.
Finally, the ambulance came to a stop beside the weak-pulsed PhD candidate.
“Do you know this kid?” one of the paramedics asked Sam, as they loaded the double onto a stretcher.
“Yeah.” Sam smiled weakly. “We’re as close as it gets.”
He sat in the back of the ambulance, as the paramedics continued to work, and wished there was more he could do.
He followed as far as he could go into the emergency room, and stayed there until the night, filling out each form that was sent his way on behalf of his former self. He let them clean up and dress the grazes on his hands.
Al still didn’t show up.
And, after the doctors did all they could — and he knew they did their best; he had studied medicine with some of them — Sam knew from the look on the nurse’s face as he approached him in the waiting room that it was bad news.
“I’m so sorry, Miss Bennett. We did everything we could, but…”
Sam swallowed hard as he waited for him to finish the sentence.
“Uh, maybe it’s best if I let Doctor Marshall explain. Come with me.”
Sam followed the nurse into the ICU, where he was shown to his younger self hooked up to life support. Doctor Fred Marshall, who Sam recognised from his medical internship, was tending to the machines, and turned around as the two entered. Sam spotted the glistening of tears in his eyes.
Sam glanced down at the chart which hung at the foot of the hospital bed, before giving the doctor a look of grave comprehension.
“He’s not waking up, is he?”
The nurse shook his head slowly.
“We’re contacting his family,” said Doctor Marshall, “and they’ll decide what action to take from here.”
Sam bit his lip. “Whether to pull the plug, you mean?”
If Sam Beckett dies here, then what happens to me? What happens to the Project?
It dawned on him exactly why Al hadn’t shown up: No Sam, no Project Quantum Leap. No Imaging Chamber. No Ziggy.
Would Sam, then, be the next to disappear? Erased from existence?
* * *
Sam didn’t leave the hospital for a long time that night. Instead, he paced the waiting room as if by being here, he could magically restore the other waiting room, the one in Stallions Gate, New Mexico, where Yolanda had been while he kept her life warm in her absence.
Oh god, where is she now? The thought was an uncomfortable one. He was still here, despite the paradox he’d created — was she still in a Waiting Room somewhere, locked in some kind of temporal bubble? Or was she just removed from existence by the powers that be?
If only he hadn’t gone to Cambridge. If only Ziggy hadn’t given him that objective. If only…
Sam’s head hurt. Specifically, his left temple. It throbbed. It wasn’t lost on him that his younger version’s head injury originated from that same spot.
“Miss Bennett…”
Sam felt a tap on his shoulder, and he turned to see Doctor Marshall’s tired face.
“You don’t have to stay here… there’s nothing more to do.”
“What did my… uh, his family say?” Sam asked, nervously biting his thumbnail.
“I spoke to Sam’s father; they’ll be driving here tomorrow to see him one last time.”
Sam’s heart jumped to his throat.
“They’re coming here?” he murmured, eyes welling up.
Then, see me one last time they will.
* * *
Sam lay sleepless in Yolanda’s bed, staring at the ceiling. He felt that if he closed his eyes for more than a second, he might never open them again; might vanish from the fabric of reality like gluons in a quantum field.
He rolled over, and met the eye of his reflection in a mirror on the wall.
“If you’re still out there… I’m sorry,” he told the woman looking back. “I don’t know how to fix this.”
Sam had read enough science fiction to know he was at ground zero of a Grandfather Paradox. He’d caused his own death in the past, undoing the pathway for him to have come here at all. It was a mystery what would happen from here. He imagined the universe encountering a Blue Screen of Death, entering an infinite reboot loop.
Was there some kind of a divine IT technician for a corrupted universe?
Sam chuckled bitterly at this unhelpful train of thought. He needed sleep. His head really was pounding, too…
In spite of his existential fears, he dared close his eyes, and fell rapidly into an uneasy sleep.